;-NRLF 


3    flES 


THE  LIBRARY 

OF 
THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 


GEORGE  WILLIAM  CURTIS 


Bn 


BY 


JOHN   WHITE  CHADWICK 


NEW     YORK 
HARPER   &   BROTHERS   PUBLISHERS 

1893 


Harper's  "Black  and  White"  Series. 

Illustrated.     321110,  Cloth,  50  cents  each 


GEORGE  WILLIAM  CURTIS.     By 

John  White  Chadwick. 
SLAVERY  AND  THE  SLAVETRADE 

IN    AFRICA       By   Henry   M 

Stanley 
THE     RIVALS        By     Fraugois 

Coppee. 
THE    JAPANESE    BRIDK.       By 

Naomi  Tamura 
WHITTIER  ,  NOTES  OF  HIS  LIFE 

AND  OF  HIS  FRIENDSHIPS.    By 

Anuie  Fields. 
GILES    COREY,   YEOMAN.      By 

Mary  E.  Wilkius. 
COFFEE    AND    REPARTEE.      By 

John  Kendrick  Bangs. 


JAMES  RUSSELL  LOWELL.  An 
Address.  By  George  William 
Curtis. 

Isa  Carrington  Cabell.    '        *' 
A    FAMILY    CANOE  TRIP.     By 

Florence  Watters  Snedeker. 
A  LITTLE  Swiss  SOJOURN.     By 

William  Dean  Howells. 
A  LETTER    OF    INTRODUCTION. 

A  Farce.     By  William  Dean 

Howells. 
IN    THE    VESTIBULE    LIMITED. 

By  Brauder  Matthews. 
THE  ALBANY  DEPOT.    A  Farce. 

By  William  Dean  Howells. 


PUBLISHED  BY  HARPER  &  BROTHERS,  NEW  YORK 

For  sale  by  all  booksellers,  or  -will  be  sent  by  the  publishers, 
postage  prepaid,  on  receipt  of  price. 


Copyright,  1893,  by  HARPER  &  BROTHERS. 


Tights  reserved. 


GIFT 


PREFACE 


AUGUSTUS  GRAHAM,  the  founder  of 
the  Brooklyn  Institute  of  Arts  and 
Sciences,  provided  for  an  annual  ad 
dress  on  the  evening  of  February  22d, 
on  the  character  of  Washington  or 
"  some  other  benefactor  of  America/' 
On  February  22d,  1892,  Mr.  Curtis 
gave  his  address  on  Lowell,  which  has 
been  printed  in  this  series  and  which 
was  his  last  great  oration,  except  as 
he  repeated  it  a  few  days  later  in  New 
York.  In  Mr.  Lowell's  case,  the  ex 
act  coincidence  of  his  birthday  with 
that  of  Washington  seemed  to  make 


241 


inevitable  the  choice  of  that  day  for 
his  own  eulogy.  And  then,  too,  Lowell 
was  to  have  given  the  address  of  the 
day,  if  he  had  lived  and  his  health 
had  permitted.  But  without  these  coin 
cidences  he  would  have  been  the  only 
proper  subject,  as  the  most  command 
ing  figure  of  our  recent  dead ;  and 
the  Institute  had  no  choice  this  year 
any  more  than  last,  so  evidently  was 
Mr.  Curtis,  as  our  noblest  citizen,  the 
man  who  best  deserved  the  tribute  of 
its  respectful  admiration. 


GEORGE   WILLIAM   CURTIS 

E  habit  of  this  anniversary, 
as  honored  by  the  Brooklyn 
Institute  of  Arts  and  Sci 
ences,  calls  for  an  address  upon  the 
life  and  character  of  some  distin 
guished  person  not  unworthy  to  be 
named  with  Washington  as  a  public 
benefactor.  It  is  not  understood  that 
the  subject  of  our  contemplation  shall 
be  of  equal  rank  with  that  great  captain 
both  in  war  and  peace,  to  whom  the 
loftiest  title  in  a  people's  gift  has  been 
accorded  with  devout  acclaim.  Were 
this  demanded,  the  selection  would 
be  narrowed  down  to  one  who,  not 
without  many  great  allies,  restored  the 


Urtio'n  into*  Which  Washington  had  in- 
'  tegfcat£(;i  thirteen*  rebellious  and  dis 
cordant  states,  and  who  eradicated  the 
poisonous  growth  which  Washington 
had  tolerated  with  a  fearful  heart. 
But,  if  only  Abraham  Lincoln  stands 
with  Washington  as  a  public  benefac 
tor  in  the  highest  rank,  there  are 
many  who  are  worthy  to  be  named 
with  these  because  of  their  command 
ing  virtues  and  their  splendid  service 
to  our  country  and  mankind ;  and 
among  these,  if  there  are  some  of 
more  exalted  genius  than  George  Will 
iam  Curtis,  and  more  conspicuous  and 
imposing  fame,  there  is  not  one  who 
served  his  country  with  a  more  per 
fect  loyalty,  or  who  made  himself  more 
widely  honored  and  more  deeply  loved. 
He  was  born  in  Providence,  Rhode 
Island,  February  24th,  1824  ;  but,  as  we 
gather  here  to-night,  the  nearness  of 


his  birthday  is  much  less  suggestive 
than  this  226.  of  February,  which  is 
the  first  anniversary  of  his  last  great 
public  utterance.  Then  he  spoke  of 
Lowell,  and  as  we  saw  the  speaker,  so 
graceful,  so  benignant,  and  listened  to 
his  large  discourse,  so  simple  and  sin 
cere  in  its  appreciation  of  his  noble 
friend,  set  to  that 

"music  like  mild  lutes 
Or  silver-coated  flutes," 

which  was  the  beauteous  habit  of  his 
public  and  his  private  speech,  yet 
noted  that,  however  he  might  rise  at 
times  to  the  occasion  of  his  theme,  he 
had  not  that  physical  strength  which 
in  old  days  throbbed  in  his  eager  heart, 
we  wondered  whether  we  were  enjoying 
for  the  last  time  that  sound  and  vision 
of  delight,  but  little  thought  that  he 
would  go  from  us  so  soon.  The  months 
that  have  elapsed  since  his  departure 


have  abounded  in  such  eulogy  as  never 
in  our  history  until  now  has  echoed  and 
re-echoed  the  high  praise  of  one  who 
held  no  political  office,  and  on  whom 
none  save  the  briefest  and  most  incon 
spicuous  had  ever  been  bestowed. 
The  reason  for  this  wide  and  lofty  trib 
ute  is  not  far  to  seek.  It  has  been 
inspired  by  gratitude  to  one  who  with 
his  superb  orations  stirred  in  men's 
hearts  a  wonderful  delight  and  admi 
ration  ;  whose  Easy  Chair  had  been 
domesticated  in  many  thousand  fire 
side  nooks,  and  had  made  him  who 
sat  in  it  a  friend  in  every  one ;  whose 
public  service  was  remembered  by  all 
those  whose  memories  went  back  to 
those  great  days  upon  the  edge  of  bat 
tle,  when  the  lines  were  being  sharply 
drawn,  and  all  those  who  were  asso 
ciated  with  him  in  the  more  valuable 
service  of  his  later  life.  Last,  but  not 


least,  he  endeared  himself  immeasur 
ably  to  those  who  knew  him  best, 
among  whom  were  many  of  that  guild 
which  has  the  public  eye  and  ear  con 
tinually  beneath  its  magic  spell.  And 
it  may  be  that  with  these  inspirations 
there  has  mingled  something  of  noble 
shame  and  vain  regret,  impelling  those 
who  sometimes  did  the  living  man  in 
justice  in  their  thought  and  speech  to 
come  and  fling  "  some  mountain  hare 
bell  hung  with  tears  "  upon  his  grave. 

Curtis's  stock  and  parentage  decreed 
that  he  should  be  well  born  and  hap 
pily  endowed,  and  the  great  personal 
traditions  of  his  town  and  state  aug 
mented  his  inheritance  to  a  degree 
that  made  him  rich  indeed.  His  father 
was  a  man  of  fine  integrity,  who,  for 
all  the  warmth  of  his  affections,  held 
his  children  to  a  strict  account  both 
for  their  morals  and  their  manners. 


Though  engaged  in  business,  he  was  a 
lover  of  good  books  and  profoundly 
interested  in  political  affairs.  The  boy 
was  early  motherless — too  early  for  the 
mother's  memory  to  be  a  benediction 
on  his  life.  Her  father,  James  Burrill, 
Jr.,  a  man  remarkable  for  the  dignity 
of  his  character  and  the  eloquence 
of  his  speech,  was  a  Senator  of  the 
United  States  from  Rhode  Island,  who 
opposed  in  1820  that  Missouri  Com 
promise  which  was  then  a  concession 
to  slavery,  and  afterwards  a  barrier 
across  its  fateful  way.  When  that  bar 
rier  was  removed  in  1854,  young  Curtis 
was  the  Prince  Rupert  of  the  cavaliers 
who  flung  themselves  upon  the  van 
guard  of  the  proslavery  advance;  and 
it  is  permitted  us  to  wonder  whether 
it  was  the  inheritance  from  his  noble 
ancestor  which  gave  his  youthful  blood 
that  moral  flow.  It  might  have  come 


another  way  —  from  Dr.  Samuel  Hop- 
kins's  antislavery  spirit,  one  of  the 
traditions  of  Rhode  Island  of  which  he 
loved  to  speak,  and  which  quickened 
Channing's  conscience  to  the  wick 
edness  of  human  slavery.  It  might 
have  come  from  Channing  himself,  his 
great  spiritual  leader,  and  did  come 
from  him  in  good  measure,  from  what 
ever  source  beside.  In  the  fine  old 
Unitarian  church  in  Providence  they 
show  the  pew  in  which  Curtis  sat,  a 
lovely,  fair-haired  boy,  and  even  then 
he  had  an  ear  that  vibrated  in  unison 
with  all  beautiful  and  stirring  speech. 
Very  dear  to  him  were  the  streets  of 
Providence,  and  through  them  he  wan 
dered  to  the  wharves,  where  not  long 
before  West  India  rum  and  slaves 
were  landed  as  equally  the  rightful 
property  of  Christian  gentlemen,  and, 
laying  his  hand  upon  some  great  ship's 


blistering  side,  took  in  the  genial  heat 
and  put  himself  in  mystical  communi 
cation  with  all  tropic  seas  and  shores, 
and  contracting  a  rare  scent  of  East 
ern  gums  and  spices,  to  say  nothing  of 
West  India  sugar  and  molasses,  went 
home  to  the  domestic  inquisition  in 
good  odor  with  himself  and  all  the 
world.  Later  he  came  to  love  the  city 
best  because  Roger  Williams  founded 
it  and  gave  to  him  a  phrase  to  con 
jure  with  —  "  soul  liberty/'  the  best 
name  he  knew  for  the  best  thing  under 
the  heaven's  cope.  His  early  home 
was  in  the  shadow  of  Brown  Univer 
sity,  of  which  he  had  many  pleasant 
memories  despite  the  awfulness  of 
Dr.  Wayland's  thunderous  brows  upon 
commencement  days,  and  with  which, 
through  his  brother  BurrilFs  course  of 
study  there,  he  had  the  liveliest  sym 
pathy,  dreaming  a  dream  of  going  there 


himself  some  day.  But  this  was  not 
to  be  ;  changes  in  the  father's  business 
which  brought  him  to  New  York  pre 
vented  it  and  led  to  happier  things. 
George  Eliot  sang  that 

"  Were  another  childhood  world  her  share, 
She  would  be  born  a  little  sister  there  "  ; 

and  that  Curtis  would  have  been  born 
a  little  brother  we  have  every  reason 
to  believe,  so  loyal  was  his  affection  to 
his  older  brother  and  so  gladly  did  he 
follow  where  that  brother  led.  Two 
years  in  a  New  York  business  house  did 
not  enamour  him  of  a  business  life  ;  but 
if  they  only  furnished  him  with  the  orig 
inal  of  Titbottom,  the  old  book-keeper 
of  "  Prue  and  I,"  and  with  Mr.  Bourne, 
the  poor  rich  man  in  that  book  of 
dreams,  they  could  not  have  been  bet 
ter  spent.  Then  the  big  brother,  on 
whom  the  Transcendentalists  had  cast 


their  spell,  beckoned  him  to  Brook 
Farm,  and  he  made  haste  to  leave  his 
invoices  and  sales  and  join  himself  to 
those  who  hoped  they  had  discovered 
there  the  Earthly  Paradise. 

No  social  experiment  in  America  has 
attracted  so  much  attention  in  propor 
tion  to  the  numbers  it  engaged  and  the 
period  of  its  duration  as  Brook  Farm. 
A  pair  of  Hawthorne's  lovers  once  pro 
posed  a  private  meeting,  and,  coming 
to  the  trysting-place,  found  a  picnic  in 
possession  of  the  field.  Emerson  says 
that  Brook  Farm  was  "  a  perpetual  pic 
nic,  a  French  revolution  in  small,  an 
Age  of  Reason  in  a  patty-pan."  But 
even  a  picnic  asks  for  a  seclusion  of 
its  own,  and  to  Brook  Farm  there  came 
four  thousand  curious  visitors  in  a  sin 
gle  year.  Its  history  continues  to  at 
tract  the  curious,  and  its  historians  have 
sometimes  touched  it  with  unerring 


II 

grace  and  charm  :  Curtis  from  time  to 
time,  Emerson  in  his  delightful  "  His 
toric  Notes  of  Life  and  Letters  in  New 
England,"  Frothingham  in  his  "  Life 
of  George  Ripley,"  who  inspired  the 
enterprise  and  brought  to  it  a  hope 
and  courage  that  could  not  easily  be 
disappointed  or  dismayed.  Better  than 
these,  he  brought  a  wife  of  such  intel 
lectual  and  spiritual  attainments  that, 
in  knowing  her,  young  Curtis  got  the 
liberal  education  which  he  had  seemed 
to  miss.  He  came  for  study,  a  board 
er,  not  a  worker,  save  as  his  helpful 
and  chivalric  disposition  prompted  him 
to  take  a  fork  in  the  hay-field  or  to  as 
sist  the  young  women  in  their  heavier 
tasks.  It  was  rare  instruction  that  he 
got  from  such  teachers  as  Mr.  and  Mrs. 
Ripley,  George  P.  Bradford  in  belle- 
lettres,  Charles  A.  Dana  in  German, 
John  S.  Dwight  in  music.  Then,  too, 


there  were  distinguished  visitors — Em 
erson  ;  Alcott ;  Theodore  Parker,  com 
ing  across  the  fields  from  his  West  Rox- 
bury  parsonage ;  William  Henry  Chan- 
ning,  full  of  a  fine  enthusiasm  and  a 
moving  eloquence ;  and  Margaret  Ful 
ler,  brilliant,  entertaining,  fascinating 
in  her  wise  and  beautiful  discourse. 
These  threw  of  what  they  had  into  the 
treasury  of  the  common  good.  The 
community  was  at  first  idyllic  in  its 
spontaneous  simplicity,  and  afterwards 
mechanical  under  the  Fourier  dispen 
sation,  which  our  young  student  did 
not  like  nor  long  endure.  With  a  pro 
foundly  serious  aspiration  at  its  heart, 
there  were  some  follies  and  vagaries, 
and  of  humorous  circumstance  there 
was  no  lack.  Shunning  "the  squalid 
contentment  of  society,'7  it  looked  some 
times  as  if  this  had  been  exchanged  for 
the  "  brassy  and  lacquered  life  "  of  the 


13 

hotel.  Hawthorne — who  came  to  court 
the  muses,  and  had  none  of  Ripley's 
meditative  satisfaction  in  milking  a 
dissentient  cow — afterwards  made  the 
Farm  the  subject,  after  a  fashion,  of  his 
"  Blithedale  Romance,"  describing  per 
fectly  the  externals  of  the  scene,  but 
leaving  out  the  spiritual  contents.  He 
protested  that  he  did  not  intend  his 
novel  for  a  portrait;  but  Curtis,  writ 
ing  that,  nevertheless,  it  represented 
what  Brook  Farm  was  to  Hawthorne, 
resented  the  picture  as  no  less  false  to 
the  enterprise  in  general  than  to  Mar 
garet  Fuller  in  particular.  "  No  friend," 
said  Emerson,  "who  knew  Margaret 
Fuller  could  recognize  her  rich  and 
brilliant  genius  under  the  dismal  mask 
which  the  public  fancied  was  meant  for 
her  in  that  disagreeable  story."  One 
thing  could  hardly  be  more  different 
from  another  than  was  Mr.  Curtis's  hap- 


14 

py  and  grateful  recollection  of  his  two 
years  at  Brook  Farm  from  Hawthorne's 
lugubrious  romance.  He  never  forgot 
the  debt  he  owed  to  it,  and  to  his  broth 
er  for  directing  thitherward  his  steps. 
The  flowers  and  fruits  he  gathered  there 
furnished  the  seeds  of  many  a  future 
good.  Very  pleasant  are  the  recollec 
tions  of  his  happy  youth,  as  he  enjoyed 
it  there,  which  have  been  cherished  by 
his  friends.  In  those  recollections  he 
passes  and  repasses,  graceful  as  a  fawn, 
his  face  as  gravely  beautiful  as  in  his 
maturer  years,  impersonating  Hamlet 
in  the  masquerade  or  singing  the  whole 
evening  long  to  the  Arcadian  band ;  his 
best  distinction  being  that  he  was  the 
little  children's  friend,  blessing  them 
where  others  cursed,  and  always  ready 
to  help  them  in  a  tangled  lesson  or  lead 
them  in  a  merry  game. 

The  highest  influence  which  touched 


15 

him  at  Brook  Farm  was  that  of  Emer 
son.  The  same  influence  was  continued 
at  Concord  for  two  years,  and  deepened 
by  a  closer  contact  and  more  frequent 
intercourse  with  the  gentle  seer.  It 
was  an  influence  more  practical  than 
speculative.  The  doctrine  of  the  Over- 
soul  might  be  so  high  that  he  could  not 
attain  to  it;  but  the  summons  to  sim 
plicity,  to  sincerity,  to  independence,  to 
a  preference  for  the  light  within  his 
own  clear  breast  to  any  other,  however 
vaunted  as  from  heaven,  was  perfectly 
comprehensible — easily  understood,  if 
not  as  easily  obeyed.  At  Concord  the 
brothers  were  hired  laborers  with  one 
farmer  and  another ;  but  shortening  the 
working  hours,  except  in  hay-time,  that 
they  might  explore  "  the  unknown  riv 
er  "  or  the  country  roads  or  give  them 
selves  to  serious  studies.  The  Con 
cord  residence  also  brought  our  hero 


i6 

into  personal  relations  with  Haw 
thorne,  Thoreau,  Alcott,  and  Ellery 
Channing,  but  with  imperfect  sympa 
thy,  not  even  Emerson's  good  opinion 
of  Alcott's  wisdom  being  able  to  prevent 
Curtis's  listening  to  it  with  an  incred 
ulous  smile  and  speaking  of  it  with  an 
irreverent  laugh.  Already  the  extreme 
ly  practical,  unspeculative  quality  of  his 
mind  was  making  itself  evident.  The 
profound  originality  of  Emerson  never 
lost  its  hold  upon  his  mind,  but  for 
what  was  merely  peculiar  and  eccentric 
in  the  Transcendental  Movement  he 
soon  acquired  a  frank  distaste.  Pos 
sibly  he  had  heard  from  Emerson  the 
wise  saying  of  Goethe,  "A  talent  is  per 
fected  in  solitude ;  a  character,  in  the 
stream  of  the  world."  It  was  on  the 
formation  of  a  character  that  at  this 
time  he  was  bent,  and  for  this  the 
isolation  of  a  peculiar  people  seemed 


17 

hardly  more  favorable  than  solitude. 
And  so  again  he  followed  the  big 
brother's  lead  —  this  time  to  Europe 
for  four  years  of  residence,  mixing 
with  huge  enjoyment  of  the  spectacle 
a  good  deal  of  studious  work,  adding 
one  European  language  to  another,  and 
attending  lectures  in  the  German  uni 
versities.  But  all  Europe  was,  in  fact, 
his  university,  with  a  post-graduate 
course  in  Egypt  and  the  Holy  Land. 

He  went  abroad  in  1846,  when  he 
was  twenty-two  years  old,  and  returned 
in  1850.  Doubtless  in  some  respects 
a  more  definite  curriculum  would  have 
furnished  him  with  a  better  education. 
But  it  was  not  as  if  he  had  put  a  girdle 
round  the  earth  in  forty  minutes.  His 
whole  course  of  travel  was  unhurried, 
and  in  Venice  and  Berlin  he  lingered  a 
whole  season  through.  With  Cranch 
and  Hicks  and  Kensett  he  revelled  in 
3 


18 

the  wonders  of  Italian  art  and  in  the 
skies  that  overhung  so  smilingly  the 
sad  and  strange  memorials  of  a  great 
ness  that  had  passed  away.  That  his 
stay  in  Europe  coincided  with  the  rev 
olution  of  1848  was  a  circumstance  of 
immense  significance,  giving  a  sharper 
spice  of  personal  danger  to  journeys 
which  at  the  best  were  none  too  safe ; 
the  fierce  outbreaks  in  every  city  fur 
nishing  moments  of  exuberant  hope 
and  tragedies  of  inevitable  defeat. 
Here  was  a  world  so  much  larger  than 
any  that  our  saunterer  had  known  be 
fore,  that  it  could  not  but  expand  his 
sympathies  and  give  his  thoughts  a 
wider  and  a  deeper  flow.  At  the  same 
time  it  stored  his  mind  with  an  incal 
culable  wealth  and  splendor  of  histor 
ical  associations  and  with  memories 
of  delightful  scenes  and  happy-hearted 
friends,  which  later  were  to  him  an  in- 


19 

exhaustible  resource  when  he  would 
give  his  public  utterance  some  rarer 
charm  or  clothe  it  with  some  ampler 
grace. 

It  must  not  be  imagined  that  up  to 
this  time  Curtis  had  been  merely  a 
passive  bucket,  coolly  accepting  every 
thing  that  was  pumped  into  him  and 
rendering  nothing  back.  To  be  a  man 
of  letters  was  his  dream  before  he  left 
Brook  Farm.  There  and  at  Concord  he 
wrote  many  things,  but,  with  an  exigent 
ideal  they  did  not  satisfy,  he  kept  them 
to  himself  or  only  read  them  privately. 
To  read  them  now  would  do  much,  no 
doubt,  to  dispel  the  sweet  illusion  that 
his  style  was  heaven-born,  needing  no 
patient  travail  of  his  mind  to  bring  it 
forth.  They  would  reveal  "the  steps 
of  beauty  "  by  which  he  climbed  from 
his  first  crudities  and  imperfections  to 
so  much  of  ease  and  grace  as  marked 


his  early  publications ;  also  the  pri 
mordial  germs  of  some  of  the  most 
lovely  fancies  of  his  later  years.  Cer 
tain  letters  to  the  Harbinger  in  1845 
were  his  first  venture  of  a  public  char 
acter,  and  the  publicity  was  not  gross, 
but  narrow  and  select,  seeing  that  the 
Harbinger  was  the  organ  of  the  Brook- 
Farmers  in  their  Fourierite  decadence. 
The  letters  were  written  from  New  York 
in  the  interim  between  his  leaving  Con 
cord  and  his  going  abroad.  They  were 
musical  and  dramatic  criticisms.  From 
Europe  he  sent  occasional  letters  to  the 
New  York  Times  and  Tribune,  and  on 
his  return  he  immediately  engaged  in 
musical  and  dramatic  criticism  for  Mr. 
Greeley,  who  by  this  time  had  made 
Ripley  of  Brook  Farm  the  literary  edi 
tor,  and  Charles  A.  Dana,  Curtis's  best 
friend  in  the  same  Arcadia,  the  manag 
ing  editor  of  his  paper.  Shortly  his  tal- 


ent  took  a  wider  sweep,  and  the  read 
ers  of  the  Tribune,  in  1851,  found  Mr. 
Greeley's  heartless  recommendations  of 
the  recent  compromise  measures  as  the 
best  we  could  expect  agreeably  diversi 
fied  with  those  studies  of  Newport  and 
Nahant  and  Saratoga  and  the  other  wa 
tering-places  of  that  time  which  make 
up  the  book  called  "  Lotus-Eating."  It 
is  a  charming  book ;  so  charming  that 
to  stay  at  home  and  read  it  would  per 
haps  give  more  pleasure  than  those  fa 
mous  places  now  afford.  Doctor  Chan- 
ning  thought  it  not  presumptuous  to 
hope  that  something  corresponding  to 
our  earthly  joys  of  air  and  light  would 
be  permitted  us  in  another  life,  and  in 
this  particular  Curtis  must  have  sympa 
thized  with  him.  He  had  the  art  of 
husbanding  these  joys  and  of  so  mak 
ing  his  words  express  them  that  those 
days  of  long  ago  still  shed  their  beauty 


on  our  hearts.  In  these  studies  there 
was  a  good  deal  of  comparative  scenery, 
the  writer  was  so  drenched  in  mists 
of  Alpine  heights  and  falling  waters, 
and  in  the  associations  of  an  older  civ 
ilization.  The  "  emotion  recollected  in 
tranquillity  "  was  often  keener  than  any 
which  the  immediate  object  could  ex 
cite.  But  more  important  than  the  de 
scription  of  each  lovely  scene  was  the 
eye  for  social  manners  and  the  stroke 
that  gave  their  hollowness  and  insin 
cerity,  their  meanness  and  vulgarity, 
a  shameful  perpetuity  upon  the  vivid 
page. 

Almost  simultaneously  with  "  Lotus- 
Eating"  appeared  the  "Nile  Notes  of 
a  Howadji,"  and  soon  after  "  The  How- 
adji  in  Syria."  Whereupon  the  young 
author  woke  up  one  fine  morning  to 
find  himself  famous  and  dubbed  "  The 
Howadji "  by  his  friends,  from  whom 


the  sobriquet  was  caught  up  by  the 
general  public  and  did  much  to  invest 
him  with  a  mysterious  charm,  as  vague 
and  penetrating  as  some  perfume  of  the 
Eastern  world.  In  point  of  art  these 
books  were  an  advance  upon  the  "  Lo 
tus-Eating,"  but  morally  they  marked  a 
previous  stage.  They  were  no  stern  re 
flections  on  the  soft,  languorous  mood 
the  Orient  had  woven  round  and  round 
him  with  its  subtle  spells.  They  were 
the  reproduction  of  that  mood,  floated 
off  from  the  pages  of  his  journal,  where 
it  lay  as  warm  as  Eastern  draperies 
and  as  bright  as  Khadra's  smile.  As 
for  this  real  or  imaginary  Khadra  with 
whom  the  Howadji  instituted  a  flirta 
tion  in  the  Church  of  the  Holy  Sepul 
chre,  this  episode  was  doubtless  one 
of  several  which  shocked  the  Puritan 
temper  of  the  time.  In  truth  it  marked 
the  exquisite  satirical  recoil  from  the 


24 

pretence  of  holiness  in  things  and  places 
that  could  claim  no  genuine  associa 
tions  with  the  Christian  origins.  The 
one  engrossing  memory  of  Palestine 
sternly  required  reality  of  every  cir 
cumstance  and  emotion.  But  while 
the  "  Nile  Notes  "  and  "  The  Howadji 
in  Syria  "  were  not  immoral  in  a  single 
phrase  or  implication — and  Curtis  very 
properly  and  indignantly  resented  any 
suggestion  to  the  contrary — he  had  no 
regrets  or  apologies  to  offer  for  his 
complete  abandonment  of  himself  to 
the  peculiar  witchery  of  the  East,  and 
to  Egypt's  fascination  as  of  Cleopatra's 
smile.  "  Delight  and  satisfaction  which 
are  not  sensual  but  sensuous,"  he  wrote, 
"  become  the  law  of  your  being ;  con 
science,  lulled  all  the  way  from  Sicily 
in  the  soft  rocking  lap  of  the  Mediter 
ranean,  falls  quite  asleep  at  Cairo,  and 
you  take  your  chance  with  the  other 


25 

flowers."  What  prophetess  that  had 
presumed  to  prophesy  that  the  author 
of  a  brace  of  books  written  in  this  tem 
per  would  yet  be  found  among  the  or 
ganizers  of  public  justice  and  the  lead 
ers  of  political  reform,  would  not  have 
met  Cassandra's  fate  ? — the  most  abso 
lute  incredulity  on  the  part  of  every 
one  who  heard  her  prophecy.  Nothing 
seemed  more  unlikely  in  1852  than  that 
in  1856  Curtis  would  be  stirring  up  the 
young  men  of  America  to  noble  rage 
against  a  giant  wrong.  Do  men  gather 
wheat  and  corn  of  violets  and  roses  ? 
Nevertheless,  reading  the  "  Nile  Notes  " 
and  "The  Howadji  in  Syria"  in  the 
light  of  Curtis's  subsequent  career,  we 
find  among  the  roses  and  the  violets, 
among  the  sleepy  lotuses  and  the  smil 
ing  houris,  a  few  happy  signs  that  he 
had  not  wholly  lost  the  secret  of  his 
earlier  inspirations  ;  that  the  fire  he 
4 


26 

had  kindled  at  Brook  Farm  and  Con 
cord  had  not  gone  out  upon  the  altar 
of  his  mind,  and  might  yet  touch  his 
lips  with  living  flame. 

The  time  was  one  of  moral  relax 
ation.  Horace  Greeley  and  William 
Cullen  Bryant  had  accepted  as  a  final 
ity  the  Compromise  Measures  which 
had  brought  Whittier's  "Ichabod"  upon 
Webster's  head:  if  such,  how  many 
more !  The  antislavery  vote  fell  off 
nearly  one  half  from  1848  to  1852. 
But  we  need  not  look  so  far  away 
for  influences  inimical  to  Curtis's  dis 
covery  of  his  better  self.  His  manly 
beauty  and  his  social  graces  opened 
for  him  all  doors.  He  adopted  De 
Quincey's  rapturous  praise  of  dancing 
as  his  own,  and  never  at  any  time  was 
he  disloyal  to  this  early  love.  Until 
the  last  he  would  sooner  have  spoken 
disrespectfully  of  our  old  friend  the 


27 

equator  than  of  Terpsichore — "  Muse 
of  the  many  twinkling  feet."  Culti 
vated,  brilliant,  witty,  wearing  with  easy 
grace  the  laurels  of  his  first  success,  he 
found  himself  the  cynosure  of  women's 
lovely  eyes,  the  object  of  a  thousand 
flatteries,  with  much  honest  admiration. 
Then  the  reaction  came.  There  are 
fore-gleams  of  it  in  "  Lotus-Eating,"  and 
in  "The  Potiphar  Papers"  it  blazes 
from  the  hot,  indignant  page.  "It  is 
called  a  satire,  but  after  much  dili 
gent  reading  we  cannot  discover  the 
satire."  These  words  are  Curtis's,  and 
he  is  speaking  of  Thackeray's  "  Vanity 
Fair."  They  are  equally  applicable  to 
"  The  Potiphar  Papers,"  especially  to 
the  opening  chapter,  which  is  perfectly 
direct  and  simple,  without  a  syllable  of 
paltering  in  a  double  sense.  It  was 
the  condemnation  of  a  society  which 
was  "  the  very  apotheosis  of  gilt  ginger- 


28 

bread."  Had  Curtis  seen  the  horrid 
spectacle  that  he  described  ?  Yes ;  but 
with  Titmarsh's,  not  with  Titbottom's, 
spectacles.  It  is  not  strange  that  Cur 
tis  didn't  love  the  book  in  after-years. 
He  knew  that  it  was  after  Thackeray, 
and,  like  the  artist's  "  Bull  after  Paul 
Potter,"  a  long  way  after.  He  had 
struck  with  the  butt  of  his  musket  and 
the  back  of  his  sword,  not  with  the 
bayonet  arid  the  edge.  Thackeray's 
rapier  had  turned  into  a  bludgeon  in 
his  unpractised  hand.  He  did  better 
the  next  time,  in  "  Prue  and  I,"  a  fan 
tasy  that  was  all  his  own,  full  of  the 
sweetness  and  the  kindliness  of  his 
own  gentle  heart.  It  is  just  as  good 
to-day  as  when  it  first  appeared.  It 
will  be  just  as  good  fifty  years  hence 
as  it  is  now,  for  if  by  that  time  the 
world  is  done  with  vulgar  ostentation, 
done  with  the  pride  of  wealth,  done 


29 

with  the  measuring  of  all  things  by  a 
gold  standard,  it  will  not  be  done  with 
simplicity  and  sincerity,  with  beauty, 
tenderness,  and  grace,  with  sentiment 
as  pure  as  morning's  dew ;  and  "  Prue 
and  I  "  is  a  book  so  full  of  these  things 
that  until  the  world  is  done  with  them 
forever  it  should  have  a  place  for  it 

"Full  of  sweet  dreams  and  health  and  quiet 
breathing." 

"  The  Potiphar  Papers  "  and  "  Prue 
and  I  "  were  written  for  Putnam's  New 
Monthly  Magazine,  of  which  Curtis  was 
for  several  years  an  editor,  with  Charles 
F.  Briggs  of  our  own  city — better  known 
as  "  Harry  Franco  " — and  Parke  God 
win  as  his  colaborers.  Curtis's  letters 
to  Briggs  from  all  parts  of  the  coun 
try  are  full  of  gayety.  He  address 
es  him  by  all  the  famous  names  of  his 
tory,  and  signs  himself  with  others 


3o 

equally  various  and  absurd.  Was  he 
still  able  to  maintain  this  cheerful  tone 
when  in  1857  the  publication-house  in 
which  he  had  put  all  his  patrimony, 
and  much  more,  went  down  a  hopeless 
wreck,  and  left  him  with  a  debt  upon 
his  shoulders  so  ponderous  that  not 
till  1873  was  it  paid  to  the  last  cent 
and  his  freedom  joyfully  regained  ? 
Less  conscientious,  he  might  have 
availed  himself  of  a  purely  technical 
construction  to  evade  the  monstrous 
claim  with  which  he  had  been  saddled 
by  a  dishonest  partner.  But  to  any 
friend  suggesting  to  him  such  a  course 
the  answer  would  have  been,  "  Get  thee 
behind  me,  Satan  " ;  if  not  the  words, 
"  a  fury  in  the  words  "  connoting  that. 
Considering  himself  morally  bound,  he 
manfully  assumed  the  debt,  and,  work 
ing  like  a  slave  with  tongue  and  pen, 
and  living  with  severe  economy,  he 


devoted  all  his  savings  from  his  thirty- 
fourth  until  his  fiftieth  year — the  period 
of  his  perfect  prime — to  the  payment 
of  a  penalty  too  hastily  and  foolishly 
incurred.  Here  was  an  experience  to 
toughen  the  moral  fibre  of  the  man,  if 
there  was  any  need  of  further  tough 
ening  after  the  initial  step.  The  event 
proved  that  there  was  need  of  this  ; 
that  the  stuff  which  served  him  well 
enough  in  the  antislavery  struggle 
would  have  been  broken  like  a  reed 
under  the  stress  of  such  political 
weather  as  he  encountered  further  on. 
It  may  seem  that,  in  accepting  for  him 
self  this  steep  ascent,  he  had  proved 
himself  to  be  possessed  already  of  the 
most  stubborn  and  unconquerable  will. 
But  he  that  putteth  on  the  harness 
may  not  boast  himself  as  he  that  taketh 
it  .off.  Many  hard  things  have  been 
resolved  upon  by  men  of  a  romantic 


32 

temper  in  the  self  -  consciousness  of 
some  dramatic  situation,  where  few 
have  been  carried  out  to  an  appro 
priate  end.  It  is  the  end  that  crowns 
the  work.  There  came  a  time  when 
those  who  did  not  know  the  man,  per 
sons  of  credulous  disposition  or  inven 
tive  mind,  were  ready  to  impute  to  him 
some  mercenary  or  prudential  motive 
for  his  political  action.  Then  those 
who  knew  him  best,  remembering  the 
patient  service  of  those  hard  intermina 
ble  years,  smiled  sadly  to  themselves 
to  think  that  one  who  seemed  to  be 
so  widely  known  should  be  so  little  un 
derstood. 

The  public  was  still  calling  Curtis 
the  Howadji  when  he  began  to  call 
himself  the  Easy  Chair,  having  suc 
ceeded  to  that  comfortable  -  sounding 
place  in  Harper's  Magazine,  which  for 
two  years  before  his  own  incumbency 


33 

had  been  filled  by  Donald  G.  Mitchell, 
whose  "  Dream  Life  "  and  "  Reveries 
of  a  Bachelor"  are  to-day  as  much  as 
ever  necessary  to  every  youth  and 
maid  for  whom  no  sentiment  can  be 
too  pure  and  sweet.  Considering  the 
various  work  and  worry,  corresponding 
with  the  five  and  thirty  years  of  his 
incumbency,  which  Curtis  had  to  do 
and  bear,  his  new  sobriquet  had  a 
tinge  of  irony.  The  long  course  of 
little  essays  which  as  the  Easy  Chair 
he  wrote  for  our  instruction,  warning, 
and  delight  is  a  sufficient  answer  to 
the  vain  regret  that  he  should  have 
abandoned  the  primrose  path  of  liter 
ature  for  the  shards  and  thorns  of  the 
political  highways  and  byways.  It  is 
not  the  only  answer,  for  he  was  an 
editor  and  an  orator  as  well  as  an  es 
sayist  for  thirty  years,  and  both  as 
orator  and  editor  he  was  as  much  the 


34 

man  of  letters  as  in  the  more  unbent 
and  playful  manifestation  of  his  talents 
in  the  Easy  Chair.  Those  who,  for 
getting  this,  imagine  that  Curtis  ceased 
from  being  literary  when  he  became 
political  have  only  to  compare  his  edi 
torials  in  Harper's  Weekly  with  so  much 
of  the  editorial  writing  of  his  contem 
poraries  as  makes  up  its  general  bulk, 
or  the  text  of  his  various  addresses  and 
orations  with  the  chaotic  formlessness 
or  the  swelling  bombast  of  the  contem 
porary  clergyman  or  politician.  But 
the  Easy  Chair  alone  is  a  sufficient 
answer  to  the  regrets  of  those  who, 
doubtless,  would  have  been  much  hap 
pier  if  Curtis  had  confined  himself 
to  that  and  let  their  politics  alone. 
The  various  lines  that  marked  his  ear 
lier  work  are  all  continued  here  :  the 
musical  and  dramatic  criticism  of  the 
Tribune  reporter ;  the  social  satire  of 


35 

the  "  Potiphar  Papers,"  but  with  a 
more  genial  touch ;  the  reveries  of 
"  Prue  and  I  " ;  while  the  same  travels 
that  had  furnished  the  materials  for 
the  "  Nile  Notes  "  and  "  The  Howadji 
in  Syria"  lent  their  rich  lights  and 
tender  gleams  to  many  a  happy  remi 
niscence  of  the  unreturning  days.  But 
the  essays  of  the  Easy  Chair  ranged 
through  a  wider  field  than  the  first  lit 
erary  ventures.  Sometimes,  as  in  "  Ho- 
nestus  at  the  Caucus,"  they  trenched 
upon  the  subjects  habitually  treated 
on  the  political  platform  and  in  the 
editorial  chair,  but  in  a  manner  of  their 
own.  Often,  when  some  large-natured, 
earnest,  useful  man  or  woman  passed 
within  the  veil,  we  were  invited  to  re 
flect  upon  their  virtues,  and  to  take 
to  heart  the  lessons  of  their  beautiful 
and  noble  lives.  The  good  books  as 
well  as  the  good  people  received  their 


36 

careful    and    discriminating    meed    of 
praise, 


6 


"  He  spoke,  and  words  more  soft  than  rain 
Brought  the  age  of  gold  again": 

the  oratory  of  Everett  and  Phillips  ;  the 
readings  of  Charles  Dickens  ;  the  lect 
ures  of  Thackeray  and  his  personal 
traits,  the  dinners  that  he  gave,  the 
songs  he  sung ;  the  playing  of  Thai- 
berg  and  Gottschalk;  the  acting  of 
Rachel ;  the  singing  of  many  a  delight 
ful  voice,  but  of  Jenny  Lind's  above 
them  all,  blessed  forever ;  for  when  at 
Castle  Garden,  on  the  eve  of  her  de 
parture  from  America,  she  sang  her 
farewell  song,  she  held  in  her  hand  a 
bouquet  of  white  rosebuds  and  deep 
carnations  ;  and  the  young  man,  who 
five  years  before  had  travelled  from 
Dresden  to  Berlin  expressly  to  hear  her 
sing,  alone  in  that  great  audience  knew 


37 

who  had  sent  those  flowers.  Here 
alone  was  pledge  of  a  perpetual  hom 
age,  had  not  the  divine  simplicity  of 
her  art  demanded  it.  Many  were  the 
good  causes,  weak,  struggling,  baffled, 
well-nigh  crushed  to  earth,  that  looked 
to  the  Easy  Chair  for  some  encourage 
ment,  and  did  not  look  in  vain  !  Mean 
time  the  style,  the  form,  the  manner  of 
the  thing,  which  in  the  earlier  ventures 
had  not  always  been  simple  and  re 
strained,  had  found  out  the  more  ex 
cellent  way  and  kept  it  with  an  even 
step.  Emerson's  conviction  of  the  pow 
er  of  under-statement  had  been  taken 
well  to  heart.  With  less  of  ornament, 
there  was  more  of  the  essential  beauty 
which  could  dispense  with  it  and  shine 
henceforth  with  a  more  pleasing  light. 
Seeing  that  from  first  to  last  there  were 
some  fifteen  hundred  of  these  little  es 
says,  the  marvellous  thing  is  that,  with  so 


38 

many  variations  of  the  central  theme, 
there  was  so  much  variety.  And  what 
was  the  central  theme  ?  It  was  a  plea 
for  good  society ;  for  the  best  society  ; 
which  is  not  a  matter  of  wealth,  nor  of 
some  nobody's  descent  from  somebody 
who  was  somebody  or  had  something 
in  some  former  generation ;  but  a  mat 
ter  of  intelligence  and  simplicity  and 
kindliness,  freedom  from  vulgar  show, 
the  love  of  things  that  make  for  honor, 
purity,  and  nobility  in  the  most  ordi 
nary  lives.  Here  was  a  mirror  held  up 
to  our  social  nature  in  America,  where, 
if  many  thousands  did  not  see  them 
selves  with  shame,  if  not  with  loathing, 
they  must  have  shut  their  eyes.  Here, 
too,  was  that  plea  for  the  most  Ameri 
can  as  the  most  self-respecting,  the 
most  honest,  the  most  excellent,  which 
was  the  burden  equally  of  many  an 
after-dinner  speech  and  many  a  lecture 


39 

and  address.  One  thing  has  not  yet 
been  determined  by  any  critic  of  the 
Easy  Chair  —  whether  we  should  be 
more  grateful  to  it  for  its  exposure  of 
our  social  shams  and  insincerities  and 
its  appeal  to  the  better  instincts  of  our 
social  natures,  or  for  its  contribution  to 
the  beauty  and  the  pleasantness  of  hu 
man  life,  the  need  of  these  things  also 
being  very  great. 

But  Curtis  is  much  less  the  writer 
than  the  speaker  in  the  fond  memory 
of  his  countrymen  who  had  personal 
knowledge  of  his  lectures  and  orations 
and  in  the  imagination  of  less  fortunate 
people.  The  lyceum  forty  years  ago 
offered  a  splendid  opportunity  to  the 
men  who  could  speak  as  well  as  write, 
and  it  was  seized  upon  by  a  great  com 
pany  of  powerful,  brilliant  men,  with 
some  of  an  inferior  degree.  Curtis 
stepped  in  at  once  among  the  giants  of 


40 

those  days  on  his  return  from  his  long 
stay  in  foreign  lands,  and  it  was  not 
long  before  his  place  among  them  was 
clearly  defined  and  perfectly  assured. 
It  was  not  as  the  most  massive  or 
the  most  vehement  or  incisive  or  pro 
found  or  humorous  and  impassioned. 
These  designations  belonged  to  Par 
ker,  Chapin,  Phillips,  Emerson,  and 
Beecher.  Curtis  was  the  most  pleas 
ing,  the  most  gracious,  the  most  serene 
and  musical  of  the  goodly  fellowship. 
As  time  went  on  he  became  one  of  the 
most  serious  and  impressive.  Nature 
had  gifted  him  with  a  voice  of  rare  and 
penetrating  sweetness,  which,  somehow, 
he  had  learned  or  caught  the  art  of 
using  as  an  instrument  obedient  to 
every  touch  of  his  emotion  and  to  ev 
ery  variation  of  his  intellectual  mood. 
From  his  first  topic,  "  Contemporary 
Art  in  Europe,"  he  soon  passed  to 


41 

"  Gold  and  Gilt  in  America,"  evidently 
the  doctrine  of  "  The  Potiphar  Papers" 
driven  home  by  word  of  mouth.  It 
was  not  long  before  the  "  Sir  Philip 
Sidney  "  lecture  led  the  way  in  a  long 
file  of  splendid  characterizations  of 
gentle  and  heroic  men,  deserving  well 
the  strain  of  lofty  praise.  Sumner, 
Phillips,  Irving,  Bryant,  Lowell — these 
and  their  "star -bright  companions" 
have  a  sure  hold  on  the  immortal  years 
in  their  own  words  and  works  ;  but  they 
will  have  a  larger  place  in  many  a  pri 
vate  heart  because  of  Curtis's  sincere, 
though  fervid,  tributes  to  their  various 
worth.  Besides,  how  many  great  occa 
sions  did  he  set  each  in  its  round  of 
golden  circumstance,  and  find  in  each 
some  noble  shame  and  happy  inspira 
tion  for  the  immediate  time  !  He  never 
forfeited  the  lofty  privilege  of  public 
speech  by  using  it  merely  to  flatter 


42 

men,  or  make  them  laugh  or  cry,  when 
he  could  turn  it  to  some  good  account 
for  truth  and  righteousness.  The  city 
banquet  or  the  country  festival  that 
would  have  him  for  its  ornament  must 
have  him  on  these  terms  or  not  at  all. 
On  the  lyceum  platform  he  spoke  from 
his  own  personal  conviction  straight  to 
the  consciences  of  his  fellow-men.  As 
one  turns  over  now  the  faded  manu 
scripts,  he  may  well  wonder  whether 
the  forty -two  lyceum  associations  to 
which  he  gave  a  lecture  on  "  Modern 
Infidelity  "  in  1859  got  what  they  bar 
gained  for.  It  could  not  have  been  of 
this  lecture  that  a  lady  said  to  him, 
meaning  to  be  very  complimentary, 
"  Oh,  Mr.  Curtis,  how  flowery  that 
was !"  For  this  one  was  just  plain 
preaching,  without  one  purple  patch ; 
driving  home  with  various  argument 
and  illustration  the  protestant  princi- 


43 

pie  of  the  right  of  private  judgment 
and  the  sacredness  of  individual  opin 
ion — in  defiance,  if  need  be,  of  all  tradi 
tion  and  authority  and  public  opinion 
whatsoever.  No,  he  had  not  forgotten 
the  lessons  Emerson  had  taught  him 
in  the  days  ere  yet  "  the  superb  and 
irresistible  dandyism  that  we  all  know 
so  well  in  the  days  of  golden  youth" 
had  threatened  for  a  time  to  take  him 
in  its  snare. 

But  it  was  not  the  lecture  upon 
"  Modern  Infidelity,"  nor  that  upon 
"  Fair  Play  for  Women,"  that  made 
Curtis's  name  in  1859  a  name  to  be 
spoken  against  and  one  to  stir  up  in 
the  City  of  Brotherly  Love  a  fierce 
and  cruel  mob,  swearing  he  should  not 
deliver  his  lecture,  that  they  would 
hang  him  if  he  tried  to  do  it,  and  to 
that  end  providing  a  stout  rope.  That 
was  the  finest  compliment  that  Curtis 


44 

ever  received,  and  it  was  well  deserved, 
for  the  subject  of  his  lecture  was  "The 
Present  Aspect  of  the  Slavery  Ques 
tion,"  and  the  date  was  December 
1 5th,  thirteen  days  after  the  hanging 
of  John  Brown.  The  proslavery  spirit 
raged  as  fiercely  in  New  York  and 
Philadelphia  as  in  Charleston  or  Sa 
vannah,  and  the  fear  and  terror  were  as 
great  of  John  Brown's  marching  soul. 
Mr.  Curtis  had  lectures  in  his  portfolio 
that  would  not  have  jarred  upon  the 
sensibilities  of  a  proslavery  audience. 
That  upon  "  Contemporary  Art  in  Eu 
rope"  would  have  been  perfectly  ac 
ceptable.  But  Dr.  Furness,  with  whom 
Mr.  Curtis  was  staying  in  Philadelphia 
— the  mildest-mannered  man  that  ever 
faced  a  mob — was  of  the  opinion  that 
the  lecture  on  "  The  Present  Aspect  of 
the  Slavery  Question "  must  be  given, 
and  Mr.  Curtis  was  not  in  the  least  in- 


45 

clined  to  hold  it  back.  And  it  was  given  ; 
the  lecturer  going  to  the  hall  aware  of 
six  revolvers  in  the  pockets  of  his  per 
sonal  friends.  It  was  given  while  six 
hundred  policemen  held  the  mob  at 
bay,  though  unable  to  prevent  its  shat 
tering  the  windows  and  injuring  the 
audience  with  bricks  and  stones.  It 
was  a  very  calm  and  rational  consid 
eration  of  the  only  question  which  just 
then  was  worth  considering.  Evident 
ly  the  Howadji's  conscience,  which  had 
gone  to  sleep  at  Cairo,  was  now  wide 
awake. 

But  its  awakening  had  been  late  and 
slow.  Five  years  younger  than  Lowell, 
Curtis  was  ten  years  behind  him  in  the 
arousal  of  his  antislavery  spirit.  Ap 
parently  there  was  something  in  the 
soil  of  Brook  Farm  that  did  not  make 
good  antislavery  root  and  stalk.  Low 
ell's  "  Present  Crisis  "  he  had  regarded 


46 

not,  nor  the  "  Biglow  Papers,"  nor 
Whittier's  imprecatory  psalms,  nor  Sum- 
ner's  fruitless  summons  to  Webster : 
"  Assume,  sir,  these  unperformed  du 
ties."  In  the  "  Potiphar  Papers  "  there 
is  one  sentence,  one  only,  that  is  pro 
phetic  of  the  coming  man.  The  send 
ing  back  of  Thomas  Sims  or  Anthony 
Burns  to  slavery  excites  him  to  another, 
written  from  Longfellow's  house  in  Cam 
bridge  to  a  friend.  Less  was  impossi 
ble  for  one  who  had  counted  Channing 
and  Parker  among  the  teachers  of  his 
youth.  But  in  1856  he  also  was  among 
the  prophets.  Whence  his  awakening  ? 
In  part,  no  doubt,  from  the  same  shock 
which  had  awakened  Abraham  Lincoln 
to'  a  new  manhood,  and  the  conviction 
that  a  house  divided  against  itself  could 
not  stand — the  repeal  of  the  Missouri 
Compromise  in  1854.  In  part,  some 
thing  quite  different  and  much  more 


47 

personal.  The  girl  who  drew  him  to 
herself  from  all  the  multitude  with 
whom  he  had  danced  so  dreamily  was 
a  daughter  of  Francis  George  and  Sarah 
B.  Shaw,  and  these  were  antislavery 
people  through  and  through.  They  had 
received  the  gospel  from  Theodore  Par 
ker  when  they  were  his  West  Roxbury 
parishioners,  and  from  Lydia  Maria 
Child,  a  teacher  of  the  teachers  in  this 
holy  war.  No  more  than  Garrison  could 
they  say,  "  This  one  thing  I  do  " ;  but 
every  true  reform,  as  such,  attracted 
them.  Their  influence  upon  Curtis 
must  have  been  very  great,  so  perfect 
ly  did  they  command  his  admiration 
and  inspire  his  reverence  and  love. 
But,  whatever  influences  worked  the 
change,  it  was  unmistakable,  and  it  was 
potent  for  incalculable  good.  Some 
thing  romantic  in  the  character  of  Fre 
mont  may  have  made  it  easier  for  Cur- 


48 

tis  to  espouse  his  cause.  But  once 
espoused,  it  lifted  him  at  once  into  the 
height  of  the  great  argument  which  was 
then  going  on.  At  Middletown,  Con 
necticut,  he  addressed  the  students  of 
the  Wesleyan  University  on  "  The  Duty 
of  the  American  Scholar  to  Politics 
and  the  Times."  He  said:  "I  would 
gladly  speak  to  you  of  the  charms  of 
pure  scholarship  ;  of  the  dignity  and 
worth  of  the  scholar;  of  the  abstract 
relation  of  the  scholar  to  the  State. 
.  .  .  But  would  you  have  counted  him 
a  friend  of  Greece  who  quietly  dis 
cussed  the  abstract  nature  of  patriot 
ism  on  that  Greek  summer  day  through 
whose  hopeless  and  immortal  hours 
Leonidas  and  his  three  hundred  stood 
at  Thermopylae  for  liberty?"  The  ap 
plication  was  obvious,  but  it  was  not 
left  to  be  inferred.  It  was  insisted  on 
with  all  the  frankness,  emphasis,  and 


49 

eloquence  that  the  young  speaker  could 
command.  Kansas  was  the  new  Ther 
mopylae.  The  duty  of  the  American 
scholar  was  to  fight  slavery-extension 
there  and  wherever  it  should  rear  its 
horrid  front.  The  same  word  was  spo 
ken  to  the  young  men  of  other  colleges. 
We  have  all  met  some  of  those  young 
men,  now  getting  old,  and  their  faces 
have  glowed,  and  their  eyes  have  flashed 
or  dimmed,  as  they  have  told  us  how 
their  hearts  leaped  up  to  meet  the 
young  orator's  challenge  of  their  man 
hood  with  a  glad  reply.  It  was  a  pro 
foundly  significant  circumstance  that 
then,  and  for  the  next  four  years,  Cur 
tis  was  a  young  man  speaking  to  young 
men.  The  young  manhood  of  the  coun 
try  elected  him  its  representative  in 
the  great  debate,  idealized  itself  in  the 
bright  vision  of  his  radiant  personality 
and  glowing  speech,  and  pledged  itself 
7 


50 

to  go  upon  whatever  quest  this  Galahad 
assigned.  The  careful  student  of  those 
times  assures  us  that  it  was  the  vote  of 
the  young  men  who  came  to  their  first 
ballot  from  1856  to  1860  that  made 
the  defeat  of  Fremont  in  the  former,  a 
victory  for  Lincoln  in  the  latter,  year. 
But  they  did  more  than  this :  they 
made  the  victory  for  Lincoln  a  victory 
for  emancipation  as  the  war  went  on ; 
albeit  the  Republican  party  had  so  far 
assimilated  the  Compromises  of  1850, 
and  Daniel  Webster's  seven th-of-March 
speech,  that  neither  in  its  platform  of 
1856  nor  in  its  platform  of  1860  had  it 
demanded  the  repeal  of  the  Fugitive- 
Slave  Law  or  the  abolition  of  slavery 
in  the  District  of  Columbia.  It  was 
the  Abolitionist -Republicans  that  put 
the  war-power  of  the  government  into 
Lincoln's  hands  and  bade  him  use  it 
for  the  emancipation  of  the  slave.  And 


Curtis  was  an  Abolitionist-Republican, 
a  Republican  with  a  truly  moral,  not 
merely  a  political,  hatred  of  slavery,  and 
his  influence  with  the  young  men  of 
America  was  compact  not  merely  with 
hatred  of  slavery-extension,  but  with 
hatred  of  slavery  itself,  and  the  con 
viction  that  slavery  in  America  must 
perish  before  Freedom  could  begin  to 
live  her  proper  life.  It  was  an  influence 
distinctly  calculated  to  abate  the  in 
fluence  of  the  cohorts  of  place-hunters, 
whom  the  doubtfulness  of  victory  had 
kept  at  bay  in  1856,  but  whom  the  pros 
pect  of  victory  in  1860  brought  down 
like  a  wolf  on  the  fold.  Here,  in  this 
three-fold  service — his  marshalling  of 
the  young  men  the  way  that  they  should 
go,  his  abolitionizing  of  the  Republi 
can  party,  his  distrust  of  those  who 
came  into  the  party  as  it  swept  to  vic 
tory  because  they  understood  that  to 


52 

the  victors  in  politics  belonged  the 
spoils  of  office  —  here  was  a  service 
which  would  make  the  name  of  Curtis 
forever  eminent  and  honorable  if  he 
had  done  no  other  to  the  party  that  he 
loved  so  much,  to  the  country  that  he 
loved  so  much  more  than  party,  to  the 
wide  humanity  and  the  eternal  justice 
that  he  loved  the  most  of  all. 

Yet  this  was  but  a  little  part  of  his 
great  work;  and  from  1863,  when  he 
became  editor  of  Harper's  Weekly,  his 
opportunity  for  influencing  his  coun 
trymen  was  immeasurably  enhanced. 
Here  was  a  chair,  less  easy  than  the 
other,  from  which  he  could  speak  every 
week  to  some  two  or  three  hundred 
thousand  of  his  countrymen,  if  not 
twice  or  thrice  as  many.  So  great  a 
privilege  was  never  more  enjoyed  or 
exercised  with  a  better  conscience  for 
the  work  in  hand.  If  his  leaders  do 


53 

not  contain  a  history  of  our  politics 
during  thirty  interesting  and  eventful 
years,  they  contain  a  commentary  and 
a  criticism  on  that  history  of  great 
value,  and  in  their  day  they  were  an 
effective  contribution  to  public  opin 
ion  and  did  much  to  shape  it  to  the 
most  honorable  and  useful  ends.  The 
editor's  predilection  was  for  the  larger 
aspects  of  events,  and  from  his  calm 
discussion  one  would  hardly  guess,  at 
this  remove,  what  storms  were  some 
times  beating  on  the  four  corners  of 
the  house,  and  how  the  fountains  of  the 
great  political  deep  were  broken  up.  It 
is  easy  to  be  wise  long  after  the  event ; 
not  easy  to  be  always  wise  right  in  the 
heart  of  it.  Could  Curtis  have  fore 
seen  all  that  he  saw  at  length,  he  would 
have  written  differently  of  many  persons 
and  of  many  things.  But  in  the  main  it 
is  remarkable  how  frequently  his  judg- 


54 

ment  has  been  ratified  by  the  subse 
quent  consensus  of  the  competent.  To 
the  impeachment  of  President  Johnson 
he  brought  a  hesitating  sympathy ;  but, 
when  the  impeachment  failed,  there 
was  no  hesitation  in  the  stern  rebuke 
which  he  administered  to  those  who 
were  for  drumming  Fessenden  and 
Grimes  and  Trumbull  out  of  the  party 
because  they  had  refused  to  vote  ac 
cording  to  the  partisan  dictation.  In 
the  agonies  of  reconstruction  he  fore 
saw  the  dangers  that  would  ensue  on 
the  enfranchisement  of  the  emanci 
pated  slaves ;  but  he  was  a  politician 
after  the  manner  of  Burke,  insisting 
that  one  must  always  do  the  best  thing 
possible,  though  it  may  not  be  the  best 
imaginable.  He  brought  the  same 
common-sense  to  the  disputed  election 
of  1876,  advocating  in  advance,  and 
afterwards  sustaining  loyally,  the  heroic 


55 

remedy  that  allayed  the  raging  fever  of 
the  time.  He  thought  highly  of  the 
advice  which  Sir  Philip  Sidney  gave 
his  brother,  "  Whenever  you  hear  of  a 
good  war,  go  to  it,"  and  in  his  editorial 
work  he  never  failed  to  act  upon  this 
hint.  At  one  time  it  was  a  war  for 
municipal  purification  ;  at  another  for 
the  rights  of  women  to  whatever  of  in 
dustrial,  educational,  and  political  en 
largement  they  require  for  a  more  com 
plete  and  noble  womanhood ;  at  another 
against  those  who  made  the  capitol  at 
Washington  for  some  years  a  den  of 
thieves;  and  first,  last,  and  always  the 
war  he  went  to  was  a  war  for  inde 
pendence  in  politics  and  for  the  con 
duct  of  the  civil  government  on  busi 
ness  principles — "The  tools  to  those 
who  can  handle  them,  as  long  as  they 
handle  them  well." 

When  Curtis  spoke  of  Lowell  in  this 


56 

place  a  year  ago,  his  admiration  for  his 
friend,  ascending  from  one  summit  to 
another,  hailed  him  at  last  the  repre 
sentative  Independent  in  our  politics. 
Straightway  we  saw  the  wreath  which 
he  had  woven  for  another  circle  his 
own  head.  With  happy  and  serene 
unconsciousness,  in  describing  Lowell's 
independency  he  had  described  his 
own ;  and  when  we  gave  him  our  ap 
plause,  it  was  even  more  for  Lowell's 
eulogist  than  for  Lowell  that  we  made 
it  loud  and  long.  No  other  Indepen 
dent  was  so  conspicuous  or  so  influen 
tial  in  1884.  He  was  the  president- 
maker  of  that  strange  and  fateful  year, 
but  his  independency  was  not  the  in 
cident  of  a  particular  campaign ;  it  was 
the  persistent  habit  of  his  whole  polit 
ical  career.  It  was  as  an  Independent, 
in  the  convention  which  nominated 
Abraham  Lincoln,  that  he  alone  of  all 


57 

the  delegation  from  his  State  refused 
to  bind  himself  to  vote  for  Mr.  Seward 
to  the  bitter  end.  It  was  as  an  Inde 
pendent  that  he-  smashed  the  party  pro 
gramme  in  the  same  convention,  when 
it  had  driven  out  Joshua  R.  Giddings 
and  refused  to  incorporate  a  phrase 
from  the  Declaration  of  Independence 
in  the  party  platform.  Then  it  was 
that,  with  one  of  the  shortest  speeches 
that  he  ever  made,  he  reversed  the  ac 
tion  of  the  convention  and  brought 
back  its  "  grand  old  man "  to  enjoy 
the  triumph  won.  It  was  as  an  Inde 
pendent  that  he  stood  in  1868  for  the 
right  of  Fessenden  and  his  companions 
to  vote  as  they  thought  best  on  the 
impeachment,  whatever  the  most  se 
cret  counsels  of  the  party  had  decreed. 
It  was  as  an  Independent  that  he  ad 
vised  men  to  refuse  their  votes  to  one 
candidate  for  the  governorship  of  New 

3 


58 

York  and  to  vote  against  another,  suit 
ing  his  actions  to  his  words.  And 
when  in  1884  the  Republican  party  pro 
ceeded  to  make  what  seemed  to  him 
"  a  nomination  not  fit  to  be  made," 
there  was  nothing,  even  in  the  most 
particular  circumstances  of  the  event, 
that  had  been  unprepared  for  in  his 
experience  up  to  that  sorrowful  and 
boding  time.  In  1873,  when  General 
Butler  was  raiding  Massachusetts  in 
the  hope  of  capturing  a  nomination  for 
the  place  which  John  Hancock  and 
Samuel  Adams  had  once  filled,  Curtis 
had  written :  "  A  caucus  or  a  conven 
tion  is  merely  a  conference  of  delegates 
of  the  party  to  determine  how  the  or 
ganization  may,  at  the  particular  time 
and  under  the  existing  circumstances, 
best  procure  its  end.  ...  It  is  the 
duty  of  each  delegate  to  spare  no  ef 
fort  to  influence  wisely  the  action  of 


59 

the  party.  He  cannot  rightfully  sur 
render  his  opportunity  to  prevent  an 
enormous  and  fatal  party  blunder.  .  .  . 
But  no  delegate  has  lost  the  privilege  of 
doing  right  because  he  has  tried  to  per 
suade  others  not  to  do  wrong."  These 
principles  lost  nothing  of  their  cogency 
as  time  went  on,  and  when  the  time 
arrived  for  him  to  act  on  them  in  1884 
he  did  so  without  a  moment's  hesita 
tion,  though  not  without  many  did  he 
consent  to  take  that  position  of  leader 
ship  in  the  revolt  to  which  he  was  in 
evitably  assigned.  But  because  no 
man  had  ever  loved  the  Republican 
party  more  than  he,  or  served  it  more 
unselfishly,  it  was  as  if  his  heart  were 
cleft  asunder  by  the  blow  which  sev 
ered  him  from  its  counsels  and  mar 
shalled  him  in  the  opposing  ranks. 
The  conscientiousness  of  his  behavior 
must  be  measured  by  his  devotion  to 


6o 

the  Republican  tradition  of  nationality 
as  opposed  to  the  Democratic  insist 
ence  upon  local  rights  —  a  devotion 
which  made  him  an  independent  Re 
publican  until  his  dying  day;  by  his 
passionate  response  to  the  associations 
of  a  glorious  party  history,  in  which  his 
had  been  a  great  and  honorable  share ; 
and  by  the  great  refusals  that  he  made ; 
for  he  was  not  without  ambition,  and, 
could  he  have  accepted  the  conclusions 
which  were  honestly  maintained  by 
many  of  his  wisest  and  most  trusted 
friends,  honors  but  little  meaner  than 
the  highest  would  have  been  easily 
within  his  grasp.  But  he  had  long 
fed  his  heart  on  the  great  words  of 
Martin  Luther,  "For  it  is  neither  safe 
nor  right  to  do  anything  against  con 
science  " ;  and  in  the  crucial  hour  he 
faced  the  sovereignty  of  America,  as 
Luther  had  faced  the  sovereignty  of 


6i 


the  Empire,  and  said  very  simply, 
"  Here  I  stand  ;  I  can  do  no  other 
wise.  God  help  me  !  Amen  !" 

"  Whenever  you  hear  of  a  good  war 
go  to  it."  He  heard  of  many,  and  he 
went  to  each  in  turn  with  a  strong,  pa 
tient  heart,  doing  his  best  to  bring  the 
good  things  uppermost  and  to  beat  the 
others  down.  But  his  biggest  war-— 
which  did  not  make  his  ambition  virtue, 
because  it  found  it  so — was  against 
the  doctrine  that  to  the  political  victors 
belong  the  spoils  of  office,  and  upon 
the  practice  which  illustrated  and  en 
forced  this  doctrine  in  every  State  and 
city,  as  well  as  in  the  general  govern 
ment,  of  the  United  States.  Even  his 
political  independence  was  an  incident 
of  this  larger  business,  a  means  direct 
ed  to  the  end  of  honest  and  effective  ad 
ministration,  which  we  can  never  have 
so  long  as  it  is  understood  that  the 


62 

party  candidate  must  be  supported, 
whatever  his  moral  character,  once  the 
nomination  has  been  made.  Many, 
before  Curtis  found  his  place  as  the 
acknowledged  head  and  front  of  the 
Civil  Service  Reform  movement,  had 
appreciated  the  dangers  of  the  situa 
tion,  and  had  done  yeomen's  service 
in  the  first  steps  towards  reformation, 
which  always  cost  so  much  when  giant 
evils  are  assailed.  Those  who  insist 
that  the  spoils  system  is  inseparable 
from  party  government  are  strangely 
ignorant  that  there  was  no  such  sys 
tem  during  the  presidency  of  Washing 
ton  and  his  successors  for  a  period  of 
forty  years,  and  that  it  first  arose  from 
no  political  necessity,  but  in  General 
Jackson's  personal  animosity  to  John 
Quincy  Adams  and  Henry  Clay.  Once 
having  taken  root,  it  grew  as  only 
do  the  deadliest  morbid  growths.  It 


63 

should  go  hard  but  they  would  better 
their  instructions,  the  Whigs  said  to  the 
Democrats, when  they  had  drowned  Clay 
and  Webster  in  hard  cider,  and  floated 
themselves  into  office  on  that  amber  tide. 
With  each  successive  party  change  there 
was  a  cleaner  sweep.  There  were  some 
mild  rebukes,  some  passionate  execra 
tions  ;  but  they  were  iridescent  bubbles, 
quickly  breaking  in  the  thick  and  pois 
oned  air.  Moreover,  the  time  had  the 
defect  of  its  quality.  The  antislavery 
enterprise  was  too  engrossing  for  any 
other  to  find  lodgement  in  the  public 
mind.  Yet  the  ethical  laws  were  not  so 
silent  in  the  midst  of  arms  that  Abra 
ham  Lincoln  could  not  hear  their  sol 
emn  voices  when  he  said,  pointing  to 
a  crowd  of  office-seekers  that  besieged 
his  door,  "  Here  you  have  something 
that  may  become  more  dangerous  to 
the  Republic  than  the  rebellion  itself." 


64 

But  it  was  in  the  years  immediately 
following  the  war  that  the  evils  of  the 
spoils  system  came  home  to  the  more 
thoughtful  with  novel  and  appalling 
force.  Its  old  evils  were  as  gross  as 
ever :  the  disturbance  and  impoverish 
ment  of  the  public  service-,  the  horri 
ble  injustice  to  a  great  body  of  faithful 
public  servants ;  the  creation  of  a  class 
of  political  loafers  hanging  on  the  skirts 
of  senators  and  representatives,  and 
waiting,  like  the  impecunious  Micaw- 
ber,  for  something  to  turn  up.  But  all 
of  these  evils  were  innocuous  com 
pared  with  the  drain  upon  the  energies 
of  public  men,  who  needed  all  their 
stock  for  the  new  problems  that  were 
coming  up,  and  the  corruption  of  those 
energies  by  base  misuse.  Hence  the 
decay  of  legislative  faculty,  the  shrink 
ing  of  the  statesman  and  the  bloating 
of  the  obsequious  henchman  into  the 


65 

party  boss — that  great  American  fun 
gus  which  thrives  best  where  there  is 
most  rottenness  and  makes  it  more. 

Here  was  a  new  slavery  needing  a 
new  Garrison  to  demand  immediate 
and  unconditional  abolition,  while  still 
disposed  to  make  the  most  of  every 
possible  abridgment  of  the  monstrous 
wrong.  George  William  Curtis  was  the 
man  who  met  the  requisition.  But  as 
Garrison  had  his  Benjamin  Lundy,  so 
Curtis  had  his  Thomas  Allen  Jenckes. 
Thirty  years  before  he  had  listened 
with  admiration  to  a  commencement 
poem  by  a  young  man  of  that  name, 
and  was  particularly  pleased  with  one 
line  of  it,  which  described  the  dude  of 
that  Jacksonian  time,  a  character  as 
yet  unnamed,  as  "  vain  folly's  last  edi 
tion,  bound  in  calf."  Little  the  boy 
who  joined  in  the  uproarious  applause 
that  followed  this  description  imagined 
9 


66 

that  the  youth  whom  he  applauded 
would  be  his  brave  forerunner  in  the 
abatement  of  the  most  insidious  evil 
that  has  ever  preyed  upon  the  vitals  of 
our  national  life. 

It  was  in  1865  that  Mr.  Jenckes  in 
troduced  his  first  bill  for  the  reform 
of  the  civil  service  into  the  House  of 
Representatives.  It  was  not  till  1871 
that  the  lineal  descendant  of  this  bill 
went  into  operation.  In  the  meantime 
Mr.  Jenckes,  a  lawyer,  a  scholar,  a 
statesman,  whose  ample  modesty  could 
not  conceal  the  breadth  and  lofty  stat 
ure  of  his  mind,  did  more  than  any  one, 
if  not  than  all  others,  to  keep  the  work 
alive.  His  elaborate  reports  are  still 
an  arsenal  from  which  all  needful  weap 
ons  can  be  drawn  to  fight  the  battle  of 
reform.  Curtis,  whose  advocacy  of  the 
movement  had  been  from  the  beginning 
to  the  end  of  the  initial  stage,  was  made 


67 

President  of  the  Commission  which 
General  Grant  appointed  to  carry  out 
the  new  regulations.  For  two  years  he 
gave  himself  with  restless  ardor  to  the 
work  of  the  Commission,  conscious  of 
the  increasing  enmity  of  the  President's 
party  and  of  his  declining  interest,  so 
plastic  was  the  President's  mind  to  Mr. 
Conkling's  eager  stress,  while  Mr.  Conk- 
ling  was  the  arch-enemy  of  the  reform. 
When  Curtis  told  the  President  that 
he  would  be  overpowered  by  adverse 
pressure,  "  he  smiled  incredulously,  but 
he  presently  abandoned  reform."  Cur- 
tis's  disappointment  was  immense ;  his 
chagrin  was  hardly  less  ;  but  it  was  not 
long  before  he  rallied  his  sick  heart, 
and  went  to  work  as  never  in  his  life 
before  to  force  the  matter  on  the  pub 
lic  conscience  and  through  that  on  the 
jealous  partisans  of  either  House,  who 
relished  not  a  change  whereby  their 


68 

darling  occupation  would  be  gone. 
Civil  Service  associations  and  the  Na 
tional  League  were  formed,  and  Mr. 
Curtis,  as  the  President  of  the  League 
and  of  the  New  York  Association,  for 
a  dozen  years  exercised  a  powerful  in 
fluence  on  the  progress  of  events.  The 
opposition  was  as  bitter  and  as  rancor 
ous  as  he  anticipated,  but  he  was  never 
more  himself  than  when  encountering 
a  proud  and  arrogant  majority;  and 
to  read  his  leaders  is  to  feel  how 
his  blood  warmed  with  the  encounter, 
while  still  his  head  remained  as  cool 
as  ever  and  his  hand  as  firm. 

Teaching  in  parables  in  one  of  his 
addresses  at  the  Annual  Meeting  of  the 
League,  he  told  the  story  of  the  North 
ern  soldier  who,  asking  a  companion 
about  some  hellish  noise,  was  an 
swered,  "  That  is  the  rebel  yell.  Does 
it  frighten  you  ?"  "  Frighten  me  !" 


69 

said  the  questioner — "  it  is  the  music 
to  which  I  march."  Not  otherwise  for 
him  was  the  enraged  and  savage  yell 
of  those  who  were  resolved  that  they 
must  have  the  offices  to  keep  their  loyal 
henchmen  and  their  vicious  heelers  in 
good  heart.  Andrews  Norton  said  that 
reading  Joseph  Buckminster's  orations 
was  like  walking  in  the  triumphal  pro 
cession  of  truth.  To  read  the  twelve 
addresses  which  Curtis  made  as  Presi 
dent  of  the  League  is  like  marching 
in  the  triumphal  procession  of  reform. 
The  procession  had  its  delays  and  halts, 
as  all  such  processions  do  ,  but  from 
Hayes,  too  conscientious  to  be  loved 
by  baser  men,  to  Garfield,  a  sacrifice 
on  the  polluted  shrine  of  the  Spoils 
System  ,  and  from  Arthur,  solemnized 
by  his  tragical  initiation,  to  Cleveland, 
striving  against  fearful  odds,  there  was 
a  great  advance.  The  last  weeks  of  Pres- 


70 

ident  Harrison's  administration  have 
seen  a  tardy  extension  of  the  Classified 
Service,  corresponding  to  a  similar  late 
repentance  of  his  predecessor,  and  now 
that  service  numbers  forty-four  thou 
sand  offices — nearly,  or  quite,  one  fourth 
of  all  the  civil  offices  in  the  United 
States.  No  friend  of  the  reform  imag 
ines  that  the  Commission  is  a  perfect 
instrument ,  no  one  pretends  that  it 
excludes  all  partisan  influence.  The 
germs  of  cholera  and  typhus  are  more 
easily  destroyed.  But  the  gain  has 
been  immense,  and  it  is  prophecy  and 
pledge  of  better  things  to  come.  The 
reform  attracted  many  generous  and 
noble  spirits ;  but  for  high  enthusiasm 
and  exalted  purpose  and  unconquer 
able  hope  Curtis  was  ever  easily  the 
first,  the  leader  and  inspirer  of  the 
sometimes  wavering,  often  weary  and 
impatient,  line.  We  love  to  think  of 


7* 

Wren's  "  Si  monumentum  "  in  the  great 
London  church  he  built  to  God.  Cur 
tis  will  have  various  monuments — here 
a  memorial  academy  and  there  a  statue 
of  imperishable  bronze ,  but  there  will 
be  a  better  one  than  these.  "Would 
you  see  his  monument,  look  around 
you."  When  every  civil  office  in  our 
various  States  and  cities  and  in  the  na 
tional  government  has  been  redeemed 
from  the  old  wickedness  and  folly,  to 
see  the  monument  of  Curtis  we  shall 
only  have  to  look  around  us  on  a  polit 
ical  system  answering  to  his  hope,  of 
which  every  true  American  may  be 
justly  proud. 

The  life  of  Curtis  was  so  full  of  va 
rious  activities  that  only  the  most  sa 
lient  can  be  named  in  such  an  address 
as  this.  But  it  must  not  go  unsaid 
that,  as  Regent  and  Chancellor  of  the 
University  of  the  State  of  New  York, 


72 

he  so  interpreted  and  discharged  the 
duties  of  each  office  in  its  turn  that 
the  high-sounding  titles  were  not  too 
venerable  and  august  to  suit  the  port 
and  carriage  of  the  man ;  though  the 
regret  of  Charles  Lamb  was  his  also, 
that  he  had  never  fed  upon  "  the  sweet 
food  of  academic  institution. "  In  his 
Chancellor's  address  of  1890  he  said, 
"Amid  the  exaltation  and  coronation 
of  material  success  let  this  University 
here  annually  announce  in  words  and 
deeds  the  dignity  and  superiority  of 
the  intellectual  and  spiritual  life,  and 
strengthen  itself  to  resist  the  insidious 
invasion  of  that  life  by  the  superb  and 
seductive  spirit  of  material  prosperity." 
In  those  words  you  have  the  spiritual 
essence  of  his  life.  It  was  his  calm 
yet  passionate  preference  for  things 
beautiful  and  true  and  good  to  things 
loud  and  showy  and  unreal ;  his  con- 


73 

fidence  that  no  material  prosperity  was 
worth  having  without  devotion  to  ideal 
ends,  even  if  without  such  devotion  it 
could  long  endure. 

The  multitude  of  his  lectures  and 
addresses  upon  educational  and  social 
topics  does  not  more  approve  the 
bounty  of  his  mind  than  it  does  the 
goodness  of  his  heart.  But  this  had 
many  illustrations.  It  was  like  him  to 
read  every  word  of  Pierce's  "Sumner" 
in  manuscript  with  critical  attention. 
He  found  it  none  too  long  for  his  un 
failing  interest  in  the  depiction  of  a 
splendid  fame.  He  was  always  doing 
things  that  had  no  such  reward,  nor 
any  but  the  pleasure  which  they  gave. 
His  talk  was  history  and  biography 
and  poetry  and  politics,  a  wealth  of 
anecdote,  a  stream  of  golden  reminis 
cences  of  men  and  things ;  and,  could 
he  have  had  a  Boswell  to  take  it  down, 


74 

when  he  came  to  print  it  the  capital 
"  I "  would  not  have  given  out,  as  with 
the  Oxford  scholar,  for  his  talk  was 
little  of  himself.  Ever  loyal  to  the  de 
parted  days,  the  new  poets  and  musi 
cians  could  not  wean  him  from  the  old. 
"  Lohengrin  "  ?  Yes,  but  then  "  Lucia  " 
too ;  and  Longfellow  and  Tennyson  in 
hearty  preference  to  those 

'  *  howling  dervishes  of  song 
Who  craze  the  brain  with  their  delirious  dance." 

Freely  he  had  received  ;  as  freely  he 
dispensed",  and  yet  the  best  of  all  he 
had  to  give  was  neither  this  nor  that : 
it  was  himself,  his  personality,  so  quiet 
yet  so  strong,  interpenetrating  alike  his 
greatest  duties  and  his  humblest  tasks, 
and  his  most  leisured  hours  as  well, 
with  something  very  noble,  sweet,  and 
good,  and  drawing  us  to  him  by  such 
cords  of  reverence  and  affection  that 


75 

we  would  not  break  them  if  we  could, 
and  could  not  if  we  would. 

Reverently  and  gratefully  blending 
the  name  of  Lowell  with  that  of  Wash 
ington  in  his  address  a  year  ago,  he 
called  them  "  men  whose  lives  are  a 
glorious  service  and  whose  memories 
are  a  benediction."  "  Such  Americans 
are,"  he  said,  "  like  mountain  summits 
that  announce  the  day,  harbingers  of 
the  future  which  shall  justify  our  faith 
and  fulfil  the  promise  of  America  to 
mankind."  Of  these  mountain  sum 
mits  there  are  as  many  in  our  history 
as  there  are  in  Switzerland  of  those 
which  from  the  Rigi's  top  one  sees  in 
a  continuous  line  for  many  a  shining 
league — the  Jungfrau  and  the  Wetter- 
horn  and  the  Silberhorn  and  a  hun 
dred  others,  each  one  a  Monte  Rosa 
in  the  early  dawn.  But  it  is  not  always 
the  highest  of  the  range  whose  appeal  is 


76 

strongest  to  our  hearts ,  and  if,  among 
the  mountain  summits  of  our  history, 
there  are  those  that  lift  themselves  with 
more  solitary  grandeur  into  a  colder 
air,  there  is  not  one  that  shines  with 
a  more  lovely  light  than  that  of  the 
scholar,  the  writer,  the  humorist,  the 
orator,  the  patriot,  the  reformer,  the 
man  "  whose  every  word  and  thought 
was  a  good  deed" — whom  you  shall 
name  in  silence  in  your  grateful  hearts. 


THE  END 


14  DAY  USE 

RETURN  TO  DESK  FROM  WHICH  BORROWED 

LOAN  DEPT. 

This  book  is  due  on  the  last  date  stamped  below,  or 

on  the  date  to  which  renewed. 
Renewed  books  are  subject  to  immediate  recall. 


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